Tech Tuesday: An App for Mindfulness and Meditation

It often seems that our days are non-stop with a never-ending to-do list of things to get done, meetings to show up for, project deadlines looming and balancing your personal life on top of all that. We are trying to do it all with poor attempts at managing the stress and anxiety that might be coming up because we reason that “I just don’t have time for one more thing.”

Taking a pause in our day to take care of ourselves, do some self-care and manage the anxiety and stress coming up can make a huge difference in our productivity, mindset and ability to engage in work and at home. There is a phone app called Calm that helps to make the “pause” easy and accessible because it’s on your phone (which you probably always have on you) and it guides you on what exactly to do. Calm has mindfulness and meditation exercises with visual and audio cues to help walk you though breathing, creating a sense of calm and slowing down your mind.

One reason I really like Calm is the range of choices and you don’t have to be experienced with mindfulness or meditation to use it. You can choose different lengths of time whether you only have 2 minutes between calls or your afternoon meeting got canceled and you want to take 30 minutes to just breath and really relax. There are different soothing scenes you can choose in the background of your app that even just alone are calming.

There is lots of cool features built into the app including calendars for accountability and multi-day programs designed to focus on different aspects whether leaning how to meditate and what mindfulness is all about or focusing on a goal like better sleep. Calm is a free app although you can upgrade to different subscriptions to unlock other features. Their free offering are really great though and you could use without paying for additional programs. Calm also has guided programs that will help you with sleep, gratitude, self-esteem and overall well-being.

How are you integrating self-care into your day? Could you see yourself using something like Calm?